Pictures from Reception

I have not had time to add captions, but I thought some of you might be interested in seeing the pictures from my retirement reception that I have uploaded onto my smugmug page:  http://alchemist2000.smugmug.com/   

Dinner Details

I sent e-mails earlier this evening to all those individuals (I think) who had indicated they were planning on attending our unofficial Thomas Research Group Reunion on Friday night, February 15.  If you are planning to attend but did not receive an e-mail from me, let me know asap.  There is still plenty of time to add more people to the list, so please contact me. 

Searching the Internet

First of all, let me thank Dan Pannell for his long comment on the previous post.  If you did not see it, click on the word "comments" in the box at the bottom of that post.  In addition to the kind things he had to say, I especially appreciated his willingness to share his recollections of his time at North Texas.  I hope more of you will add your comments as well.  Please consider doing so.  We would all enjoy reading them!

As for me, I have been having fun the last several days in my spare time tracking down old former research group members on the web.  What fun it has been to find out all of the exciting things everyone is doing. 

I have received responses back thus far from the following people.  Perhaps seeing some of these names will bring back memories. 

Jennifer Bledsoe
Jim Davis
George DeLong
Don Ellington
Philip Gravelle
Randy Jensen
Dan Pannell
Rob Petros
Marco Rodriguez
Keith Rowland
Nicole Sellers
Connie Wang
Ken Wegner

Thanks to each of them for taking the time to respond to me.  I won't post contact info here for these people since I don't know how they would feel about that, but hopefully some of them will post comments for everyone to see.  If there are particular people for whom you would like contact information, send me an e-mail and I will share what I have. 

I still have a number of inquiries out to other people through e-mail, connect requests on LinkedIn, or the like.  I hope to be able to add to the above list soon. Unfortunately I have found no information for a large number of people, but I am still looking.  If you have any information about other group members, please help me out.

Check back again soon.  I will try to add information about what some of these people have been up to since they left Denton. 

All the best,

Ruthanne Thomas
rthomas@unt.edu

Yes, I am retiring...but what is this blog all about?

Yes, I am retiring.  I finally decided to move on to the next phase of my life.  My last day at UNT will be March 1.  I started in the fall of 1981 and have held a variety of different roles over the years, but they have always been within the same university (although the name of the university changed along the way).  If truth be told, I haven't quite gotten my mind totally around this yet. I find myself vascillating wildly between being very excited and being very scared.

The University plans to have the usual retirement reception event, i.e. party.  Some of the basic details for that were finalized yesterday -- Friday, February 15, 3-5 pm, Diamond Eagle Suite of the University Union.

As part of the planning, they asked me for a list of people to invite.  Of course, at the top of the list were all of my former research group members.  Unfortunately, I have been really bad about maintaining contact information on all of you.  After digging through the web (thank goodness for LinkedIn and Facebook!), I have found many of you.  Within the next few days I will begin contacting you individually.  Although I realize this is very short notice, I would love to see you on February 15.  Even if you can not attend the events on February 15, I do hope you will at least send me your e-mail address.  Please also tell me what you have been up to since we last crossed paths. 

Thomas Research Group Reunion.  To make sure I have plenty of time to see each of you and for you to interact with each other, Cliff and I will also host a dinner that night for former research group members and their significant others.  I really do hope you can attend that event. 


So what is this "Virtual Meeting Space"  blog all about?  As I thought about this, I did not want communication to only be between each of you and me.  I wasn't sure how to do anything too fancy and still get it operational in the short time needed to make it useful, hence this blog.  Please post comments on the blog so all group members can hear from you.  Also help us track down some of the many group members for whom I do not yet have contact info (more on that in a coming post).

Hope to hear from you soon, either via e-mail or on this blog,

Ruthanne Thomas
rthomas@unt.edu